


Veridis Quo, Act Two: Escalations

by AxisAMP



Series: Veridis Quo [2]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Cameos, Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, Drama, Fluff and Angst, Game: Destiny 2: Season of Arrivals, Game: Destiny 2: Shadowkeep DLC, Gen, Humor, Post-Apocalypse, Pre-Game: Destiny 2: Beyond Light DLC, Revenge
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 18:29:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29954115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AxisAMP/pseuds/AxisAMP
Summary: A Guardian deepens his connection to the Traveler's Light. A New Light comes to terms with the life before his own, and an Old Light seeks to snuff it out. And an old threat calls out from an unlikely source.Updates every other Wednesday.
Series: Veridis Quo [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1978144
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	Veridis Quo, Act Two: Escalations

_ Knock, knock. _

The faint rapping of knuckles against the outer cover of his sleeping quarters raised VQ-7 from his inert state back into presence of mind. His eyes came into focus, what he could call a dream quickly receding to the back of his mind as his HUD burst to life. Processor readings, core temperatures, memory capacities, DER indicators, auditory and other sensory benchmark tests, all came before his eyes in the span of microseconds, imprinting in his brain immediately that his body was running at maximum efficiency. 

"Two-way view," he uttered. "Low light, audio on." 

His tank depressurized immediately, chill air bursting from exhaust ports at the back of the system and causing the young Gunslinger to recoil in surprise.

"You sleep in a freezer?" a familiar voice sounded through the system's receptors, as the cover shimmered into translucency to reveal the helmeted visage of Varys.

"Wh-" VQ looked around briefly to ensure he was still in his sleeping quarters. "Varys, what the hell are you  _ doing _ here?!"

"It's mission day!" he replied, an unusual air of enthusiasm about him.

"Yeah. And Jarvan and I were gonna meet you.  _ Not here _ ."

"I put on my mask."

"You know what could've happened if somebody saw you without that--"

"Don't baby me, VQ," Varys sighed. "I get enough of that from Jarvan."

"Oh yeah?" VQ pressed a button on the interior of his sleeping chamber, disengaging the locks and allowing it to swing open, before sitting up to face his friend. "You want me to let him know you're here? _In_ the City? Barely a _mile_ from the Tower?"

His friend averted his gaze sheepishly. 

"That's what I thought." No sooner did the word 'clock' enter his psyche, that one appeared in the corner of his HUD. "Plus, you're early. I'm supposed to be up at ten."

"It  _ is _ ten," the Awoken insisted. 

He gave Varys a look, causing him to nervously tap his helmet to bring up the time on his own HUD, and he scoffed. 

"Don't split hairs, VQ, it's nine fifty-ni--"

Suddenly, a machine in the corner of the room burst out into sound, blasting a soft guitar chord into the chamber which slowly erupted into a thrumming bassline.

" _ Now,  _ it's ten." VQ immediately burst out of his sleeping quarters, breaking out into a small, confined dance before his friend before opening his wardrobe and removing his go to chest armor apparatus.

"Bringing the Training Wheels?" the Gunslinger asked the Bladedancer.

"I'm gonna shoot you in the face one day," he responded, not bothering to throw a frustrated look Varys' way as he put it on; the pet name Amelie had given the Raiden Flux when she gave it to him had caught on among his friends, and it served as a persistent reminder of his continued training to master the Arc Light. 

"So what're we doing?"

"Giving Jarvan a hand," VQ replied. "The Vex have been reacting to some particularly hostile Taken activity on Io, and he's been tasked with investigating."

Something about it slightly disappointed the Awoken. "So, this  _ isn't  _ a you-and-me thing."

"We've been over this, Varys." The Exo turned to face his comrade, fully dressed. "It's too risky. Not unlike your being here."

Varys sighed. VQ was right, of course, but that didn't assuage him of his feelings of frustration. "Transmat?"

VQ gave a look to his friend at the dismal tone with which he asked the question, and sighed. "Well, since we're early now, guess there's no harm meeting Jarvan in the Hangar."

Varys' expression brightened instantly.

\-----------------

Jarvan Tal stood before the long, full-body mirror of his sleeping quarters, and smirked. The marks of a long, arduous battle arced and seethed across the entirety of his torso, bruises and scratches adorning almost every muscle--save his left shoulder. As with almost every morning, the twinge left by his plasma wound was the one marring of his flesh his Ghost wouldn't eventually heal, and the one ache he could not relish in.

"You're thinking about Amelie, aren't you?" A groggy female voice called out from his bed.

Jarvan rolled his eyes, bringing his undershirt over his torso. "'M' I that easy to read, or are all y'all Warlocks telepaths or somethin'?"

Erynn Vox rose from her slumber, gliding across the room to him and bringing her arms under his to trace gentle patterns across his chest. “Both,” she replied, “but in this case, the former.”   
  
“How is she?”   
  
She scoffed. “You know it’s bad manners to talk about another woman when you’ve got one in front of you.”   
  
“You started it, Erynn.”   
  
“Fair enough.” She released a long yawn, outstretching her arms and floating a few inches off the ground as she got her bearings before bringing them back around him. “She’s still shaken up. Isn’t talking much.”   
  
“She talks to you, though?””   
  
“When she feels like it. Most of the time she sleeps, trains, occasionally rides out.”   
  
“She’s not doin’ anything stupid, is she?”   
  
“Like what,” she asked, “sleeping with her best friend’s confidant?”    
  
His expression flattened, and he stepped forward out of her grasp as he took his bomber jacket and donned it. “You moved on  _ me _ ,” he retorted, insisting on defending himself.   
  
“Never said I didn’t,” she said, giggling softly, “just remarking on it.”   
  
Jarvan grumbled lowly, zipping himself up and summoning Vekna to go over his weapon loadouts. 

“Don’t take it so  _ serious _ , Jarvan,” she insisted.   
  
“You gonna tell Amelie?” he asked, his eyes reluctant to meet hers.   
  
“If I were, she’d have known before I ever got here.” She snapped her fingers, her Ghost appearing and shifting her into her typical Warlock robes. “And you’d have to scrub your own brains off these beautiful little displays.”   
  
He gave a small smirk. “Fair ‘nough.”    
  
She began to stride towards the door. “Same time next week?”   
  
“Hol’ on a sec.”   
  
“Mm?” Erynn’s head cocked slightly, and Jarvan walked forwards to meet her, his hand taking a rest upon her arm.   
  
“How many times did you--”   
  
“Five.”   
  
Silence.   
  
“Five?” He repeated.   
  
“Five.” Her eye never left his, not even to blink. “Only the first two were because I wanted them. Or needed them.”   
  
“Then why--”   
  
“Fukushu.”   
  
“What, he made you?”   
  
“He’s...I guess you’d say a zealot. Like Amelie, but less method, more madness.” Her eyes finally averted, the slightest semblance of embarrassment crossing her face. “I...wanted to keep up appearances.” She looked back up to him, finding no change in his expression to portray that he was angry with her, before continuing. “After the fourth, I decided I was done.”   
  
“Then, why--”   
  
“Amelie.”   
  
“Y’all  _ are _ telepaths.”   
  
“ _ And _ you’re predictable.” Her hands rose to his shoulders. “She got...particularly violent with him once. And I euthanized him.”   
  
“...” His eyes drifted slowly from the floor upwards to meet her own.

“First time I’ve ever seen you speechless.”   
  
“First time I’ve ever not known whether to kiss you or wring you by the neck,” he replied.   
  
“Either works,” she said with a soft smirk.   
  
He scoffed, the joke tearing a small smile from his stoic expression. “...thank you.”

“Don’t mention it,” she insisted, leaning up on her tiptoes and kissing him on the cheek before rushing out the door. "Tell Gospel I said hi--"

Something stopped her in her tracks at the door.    
  
“Jarvan?”   
  
The Titan had just turned around to give himself a final once over, and turned his head back to face her. “Hmm?”   
  
Two shadows stood behind the door.   
  
“Your friends are here.”

\-----------------

"They're kind of pretty," Varys remarked.

"What are?" VQ asked.

"The Taken."

The two Hunters and their friend came out of NLS jump in low orbit around the moon of Io. The eerie, saltwater green hue of the planetoid cast an ephemeral light over their ships, drawing rapt attention from VQ but not quite managing to wrest Varys from his occupation. Before him stood projected a few small images of the Taken commonly encountered by Guardians, and he found himself fascinated by them.

"Sorry, pretty?"

"Yeah. When they're not trying to corrupt everything they touch, there's...a beauty to them." His hand reached out as though to thumb gently against the skin of the hologram. "They look like they're just made of nothing but...light, and starstuff."

"Well," Jarvan interjected, "don't make their looks an excuse not to shoot 'em in the face."

Varys chuckled. "'Course."

The trio came down in the Lost Oasis, their Ghosts transmatting them in within a small cave system about a half mile from their mark. Vex constructs littered the far corners of the cave they entered in, drawing Varys' immediate attention as Jarvan began double-checking his equipment.

"Haven't taken a good look at these up close," the Gunslinger said, an air of calm wonder in his voice.

"They're pretty cool to look at when they're not trying to kill you or turn you into a robot," VQ posited. Varys cocked an eyebrow, giving his Exo comrade a quick once over that caused a flat smirk to cross his face. "Har-har, Varys." 

VQ turned back towards Jarvan. "Now that I think of it, do these guys have anything to do with that Seraph and IKELOS gear you keep fiendin' after--" His line of thought was cut off by a peculiar piece of equipment neither Hunter had seen Jarvan wear--a backpack.

"What's with the extra gear?"

"Need it for the trip," the Awoken replied, a distracted tone in his voice as he perused its innards to ensure he had what he needed. "There's gonna be a point where we're gon' hafta split up."

"Hang on," Varys interjected. "All this buildup to our first mission as a Fireteam, and you're gonna leave VQ and I partway through--"

"I ain't leavin' ya  _ alone _ , V. I called for some help."

"'Help'?"

Jarvan put his helmet on, changing his comms frequency. "Gospel, you here?"

Her voice came through their fireteam comms. "Affirmative."

Varys' pale face bleached further at the voice, one thus far unfamiliar to him.

"Calm down, Varys," she spoke into his comms alone. "I know who you are. And I'm not so bloodthirsty as some... _ other _ Guardians you may have been acquainted with."

"Where you at, G?" Jarvan asked.

"Cliff, about a half kilometer behind you." The Warlock took a brief moment to adjust her scope to account for the wind sweeping through the Oasis. "Been picking off Taken for about a half hour."

"Who do we got this time?"

"Ta'aurc."

"Shit," he chuckled, summoning Vekna. "Hon, gimme the big bad setup."

"Hell kinda name is Ta'aurc?" VQ chimed in.

"Former big bad Cabal general," the Awoken replied, watching as his weapons appeared from thin air on his person. "He controlled this faction called the Siege Dancers from an Imperial Land Tank outside of Rubicon."

"Imperial  _ what now? _ " Varys asked with a perplexed expression. 

"Land Tank," Gospel responded. "Massive ship, the size of a small continent on Earth."

"Anywho," Jarvan continued, "he was pretty well-defended, until a couple 'a crazy-ass new Lights managed to break through his defenses, take him out, and break ‘is grip on Freehold."

"And now, what?" VQ pulled his sniper from his back, taking aim across the way to regard the hulking former Cabal that stood at the entrance to their quarry. "His soul got eaten or something?"

"Something like that," Gospel replied, a windswept rush blaring through their comms arrays as she took off into the air. "We've only observed the power of the Taken used on the still-living, so his resurrec--"

"He was dead, he's back at it," Jarvan interjected, a somewhat harder tone bringing the conversation to silence. "We kill him again."

Varys and VQ exchanged a look.

A furrowing of the brow, coupled with a darting of green eyes from one Awoken to another.  _ Is he okay? _

A faint shrug, and a small shake of the head.  _ Not sure. Doesn't seem like it. _

A quick point from Varys to Jarvan, followed by a light clank of his hands.  _ Have you seen one another recently? _

A shake of the head.

VQ sighed. 

"Well…" Jarvan pulled the largest of his three weapons from his back, a massive gun adorned with gridded diamond inlays and exposed wiring, with a rather large fusion battery protruding from its underside. "...thousand Glimmer says I take 'im out."

"You're gonna draw the Taken out early that way," Gospel warned.

"Not if you've been doin' your job, G."

She exuded an incredulous scoff as she came to a landing next to the two Hunters. VQ regarded her with a warm nod, while Varys' hand instinctively fell to the iron at his hip for a moment. The two locked eyes for a moment; Varys' darting between her face and her sixfold wings, appearing in an ethereal orange light from the back of her robe; Gospel's between his eyes, that paralyzed her with fear only a few weeks ago, and the strange almost-Light that seemed to emanate from his hand cannon.

Their deadlock was broken by the sound of Jarvan charging his linear fusion rifle. Gospel let out a small chuckle, before quickly flapping her wings in his direction. The resulting wind forced him forward an inch, forcing him just off-balance as he let off a plasma bolt. The solar bolt whizzed inches past the head of the hulking Taken, causing him to loose a guttural roar that echoed through the Oasis.    
  
“Dammit--” he whirled his head back around, giving a scowl to his companion as she and the two Hunters scoffed and broke into laughter at the moment of levity. “What the hell--” He pointed at the former Cabal. “I’m tryna kill a freakin’ Colossus here!”

Gospel-9 gently leaned to her right to look behind him to the cliff once again, watching as the husk of Valus Ta’aurc retreated into the cave. “What Colossus?”

Jarvan whirled around to the cliff, looking upon the emptiness where Ta'aurc stood, before completing his rotation to level a scowl at Gospel. "G, what the  _ fuck-- _ "

Gospel-9 returned the expression. "You don't talk to me like that."

The sentence silenced the two fledgling Hunters immediately. Even Amelie didn't push back on him like that. A low wind through the Oasis was the only sound in the air for a moment, until Jarvan stowed his gun. 

"We're splittin' up at the final jump," he said, beginning the walk towards the cave. "G, go with VQ and V and make sure they don't get killed." Gospel wordlessly followed, giving Varys a faint nod of her head in his direction to indicate an order to follow.

The journey through which they tracked the Aspect of Valus Ta'aurc was a long one, and one frought with chasms and pitfalls and myriad dangers. While not a particular challenge to the Light-winged Gospel or the well-versed Jarvan, the Hunters for whom the trek into the depths of Io was a new one found it to be a harrowing test of their agility. VQ and Varys found themselves saving one another from horrific and inconvenient death om more than one occasion.

Over the course of the trip, Gospel took advantage of the quiet, unusually-nonverbal nature of her partner to indulge herself in something she enjoyed and he found frustrating--teaching history. She taught them of the history of the Cabal, and their first arrivals in the system during which they colonized Mars; of Io, the first place the Traveler touched, and its significance to Guardians and their enemies alike; of the Vex whose myriad machinoforms comprised a large chunk of the caverns they found themselves delving through, and their interest in the moon specifically to study the Light--until the four of them reached a towering stone beam, seeming to reach down forever into an ever-widening chasm.

“This is where I’m leavin’ y’all,” Jarvan said, the first words to leave his mouth in what felt like an eternity. “Check down there,” he continued, pointing down the chasm to a small, lighted opening about seventy feet down and ninety across. “Make your way down there, clear out everything that moves that ain’t a Guardian, find Ta’aurc, put bullets in ‘im till he stops movin’.”

“And you?” VQ asked. “Where’re you headed?”

“Toldja. I gotta check out somethin’ else. Gospel, make sure they don’t get—“

“Make sure they don’t get killed,” she repeated dryly, “I got it.”

Jarvan gave her a pained expression, followed by a faint nod before turning around to circle back across the Beam. Gospel closed her eyes, focusing on her hearing to listen for his footsteps, followed by his Lift drive engaging for another jump.  _ The gate. _

“So, Gospel, right?” Varys asked. “You’re gonna help us with the rest of this?”

Gospel sighed, turning back to face the two Hunters. “Varys, how’s your sniper rifle?”

“Full,” he replied.

“VQ, your linear?”

VQ paused to drop it into his right arm, checking his plasma battery. Even without her saying, he knew what she was asking. “Three full charges.”

"I can't believe I'm saying this,” she said, pulling her rifle into her grip. “But do me a favor and don’t get killed." She turned around, peeking across the beam at the narrow footholds towards which Jarvan had taken flight.

"Wha--" Varys shook his head in confusion, apprehension in his eyes as he took a step forward in protest. "First we need a chaperone, and now you're leaving? What the hell for--"

VQ put an arm up in front of him. "C'mon, Varys. Let's go on ahead."

"VQ--"

"You're the one who said you wanted some dynamic duo time."

Varys' expression flattened for a moment, processing the sentence. VQ was right, of course; one thing Varys had been longing for in the two months since their fateful confrontation was the chance to formally go out on missions, and here he was being offered exactly that. However, apprehension remained an ever-present sensation in his head.

"At least tell us where you're going," the Awoken Hunter asked.

"Where else?" She gave him a small, wry smile. "I’m checking on Jarvan.”

**Author's Note:**

> Jarvan's "big bad setup" is Seventh Seraph Carbine, IKELOS_SG_v1.0.2, and Sleeper Simulant.  
> Varys' 'mask' is Celestial Nighthawk, more specifically the Hrafnagud ornament.
> 
> Did I totally make the team's first mission as a fireteam a Whisper run? Sure. Fight me.


End file.
